The Feminist Spectator ruminates on theatre, performance, film, and television, focusing on gender, sexuality, race, other identities and overlaps, and our common humanity. It addresses how the arts shape and reflect our lives; how they participate in civic conversations; and how they serve as a vehicle for social change and a platform for pleasure. It’s accessible to anyone committed to the arts’ political meanings.

Wednesday, April 04, 2012

How sweet is the taste of a movie with a female
heroine heralded as the top-grossing non-sequel film debut weekend of all time? And how sweet is it that The Hunger Games, the adaptation of the first novel in Suzanne
Collins’s trilogy about Panem, a dystopian country that sacrifices its children
for the amusement of its privileged leisure class, is a faithful, stirring,
smart film that doesn’t pander to either sentimentality or sensationalism in
translating Collins’s politically nuanced story to the screen?

Starring Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone) as Katniss Everdeen, the trilogy’s heroine, The Hunger Games creates a rich material
world for a story imagined so vividly by so many readers. Director Gary Ross and his production
designers realize the fictional country’s twelve dispossessed districts and its
excessively decadent capitol in a way that convinced me it was just as I’d pictured
it as I read the novel, captivated by Collins’s narrative.

Katniss hails from District Twelve, where coal mines
provide the Capitol with energy and the district’s residents with straitened
lives of near-starvation and strife.
Katniss breaks the repressive government’s strict rules by sneaking through
the district’s boundary fence to hunt for food with her friend, Gale (a
handsome, stalwart Liam Hemsworth). Her
father died in a mining accident; his sudden death left her mother catatonic
with grief and unable to care for Katniss and her younger sister, Prim.

Katniss the hunter

Ross’s film establishes in deft strokes that
Katniss is an accomplished hunter with a keen understanding of the woods in
which she and Gale poach. Wearing
threadbare clothing and scuffed boots, she strides through the hills and trees
(Ross filmed around Asheville, North Carolina) and confidently wields a bow and
arrow to bag birds and the rare deer.
She and Gale have an easy camaraderie that comes less from romantic
attraction than from similar survival instincts, the confidence of being good
at what they do, and the imperative that they provide for their families.

Katniss and Gale in the woods before the reaping

In other words, The Hunger Games breaks stereotypes almost immediately by
representing a friendship between a young man and woman that’s not based on facile
heterosexual romantic rituals. The stakes
for Katniss and Gale are much higher—they could be killed for leaving the
district borders, but they risk their lives to put food on their tables.

Their lasting bond is broken by the annual “reaping,”
when two children between 12 and 18 from each of Panem’s districts are chosen
at random as “tributes” to compete in the televised gladiatorial competition known
as “the hunger games.” In District
Twelve, the children assemble in the town square wearing their best clothes,
shirts and pants and dresses of worn, graying cotton, while the Capitol’s bubble-headed
representative, Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks), parades before them in garish shades
of pink and red. Her excessively
colorful outfit, make-up, and wig set her off as outlandish in the district’s drab
landscape.

The garish Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) and Katniss at the reaping

To begin the reaping, Effie plays the videoed
reminder that the Games were established to assert the Capitol’s political
primacy, after the districts tried unsuccessfully to rebel against its hegemony. Before she picks the names of the unlucky
tributes, Effie unctuously pronounces her benediction: “May the odds be ever in your favor.”

When Prim is selected as the female tribute, Katniss
desperately volunteers to take her younger sister’s place, and is promptly
caught up in the horrifying preparations that propel the tributes into the
fabricated arena where the games take place.
Along with the male tribute, Peeta (Josh Hutcherson, The Kids are All Right), Katniss travels
by train toward the glittery, surreal capitol.

En route, the two District Twelve competitors are
groomed for the games by Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson), District Twelve’s
only previous winner. His drunken apathy
is downplayed in the film adaptation; as soon as he recognizes Katniss’s
gumption and talent, he’s persuaded to be the mentor he takes much longer to
become in Collins’s book.

Harrelson as Haymitch

Likewise, Cinna (Lenny Kravitz), the stylist who
helps Katniss and Peeta make an impression on the Capitol denizens and the
nation’s audience in the televised interviews before the games begin,
demonstrates immediate sympathy for his tributes’ plight. He signals his antipathy for the brutality of
the whole proceedings even as he helps Katniss establish her infamy as the “girl
who was on fire” in the pre-games parade.

Kravitz as Cinna in a pre-games benediction

In these preliminary scenes, before Ross brings us
to the central agon of games in which 24 children and teenagers are meant to
murder one another until a single victor remains, the director and his
cinematographer show us District Twelve and the Capitol from Katniss’s point of
view. The reaping, for instance, rushes
by in a blur, capturing moments and faces in fragments that seem almost Expressionistic
as they look so resolutely through Katniss’s anxious eyes.

The kinetic editing and point-of-view shots help
create an atmosphere taut with tension and fear, and beautifully capture
Katniss’s confusion and terror (and intelligence) as she’s escorted by Peacekeepers
(who look like soldiers from the Star
Wars films) into the custody of her handlers.

By giving us visual insight into Katniss’s
emotional vulnerability, Ross humanizes a heroine whose inner dialogue we can
no longer hear, as we could reading Collins’s prose. [Spoiler
alert.] Katniss’s strength enables
her to survive the games, but it could also make her appear unsympathetic and
impassive.

In fact, Mahnola Dargis, writing for the Times, found Lawrence’s performance “disengaged”
in just this way. But the film itself
addresses this quandary; Katniss isn’t cut from gregarious cloth, and refuses
to pander to the television viewers even when her life depends on it. Similarly, Lawrence doesn’t play to Ross's camera; hers is a nuanced and, I think, strong and successful performance
of Collins’s signal heroine.

Instead, Ross uses his camera to bring us closer
to Katniss’s feelings, while letting her retain the dignity of her strength and
her intelligence and, in some ways, her privacy, despite the intrusions of rabid
spectators into her life prior to and during the games. For example, in moments of duress in the arena
fabricated and controlled by the “Gamemaker,” Seneca Crane (Wes Bentley), the television
director who engineers the games much like Ed Harris’s producer character manipulated
the world of The Truman Show, we see
flashbacks to earlier moments in Katniss’s life that help explain her resolve.

Wes Bentley as Seneca Crane, with his fabulous beard

We see her father descending into the mines, and
then watch a fiery explosion that implies his death. We see her mother descending into madness. We
see Katniss's prior relationship with Peeta, the baker’s son, who defies his hateful
mother by throwing bread meant for their pigs in Katniss’s direction, as she
hovers in the rain outside the bakery, hungry and watching.

And when Katniss is stung during the games by
horrifying “tracker jackers,” an insect engineered by the Gamemaker with stings
so painful they bring on hallucinatory episodes and sometimes death, we see the
venom’s effects on Katniss from her perspective. Blurred, tunneled images capture Peeta’s
distorted voice shouting at her to run, and the woods rushing by in a swirl of
surreal light and color. All of these filmic
strategies place us squarely behind Katniss.

Ross and his team tell the story with a dynamic
style that moves it inexorably forward, even in scenes that might otherwise be
static. The whole thing feels like a
chase film, in which Katniss and the other tributes are being followed and
watched not just by one another, but by the eyes of the state, which are always
focused on them.

For instance, when Katniss first ties herself to a
branch high in a tree on her first night in the arena, she hears a mechanical
noise, and realizes that what she took for a knot in the tree trunk is actually
an embedded camera. As she peers into it
curiously, Ross cuts to people watching “at home,” in large crowds outdoors in
the districts, or on make-shift screens in their homes.

The Capitol’s technology invades their lives
not for the pleasure of information and communication, but to insure its own
hegemony. This is technology as tyranny,
the flip side, Collins suggests, of the high tech revolution as empowering.

In the book, Katniss’s inner monologue was protected
from the ravages of such state surveillance, so the reader was insured a
counter-point to the intrusions of President Snow and his minions’ power. The
Hunger Games on film, though, is also about watching. The film’s spectators,
too, have a kind of power over Katniss and, not insignificantly, over Jennifer
Lawrence, the young actor chosen for a role that will rival Bella’s in the Twilight series for fan and media
attention.

I read a snarky piece on The Daily Beast that suggested Lawrence was being ungenerous about her
fame, self-deprecating and diffident. I
didn’t see the David Letterman interview to which the article mostly referred,
but it sounded to me like Lawrence has taken a page from Katniss’s playbook,
which is partly what makes her so wonderful in the role.

Lawrence is rarely off screen during The Hunger Games. But her emotional presence is carefully
modulated. Rather than playing a more
conventional girl—although the dystopian Panem begs the question of what a “conventional”
girl would look or act like in such a hard-scrabbled existence—Lawrence plays
Katniss as tensely coiled and focused physically and mentally on outsmarting
the other tributes and, eventually, the Capitol’s manipulators.

Katniss in the arena

In Lawrence’s keen interpretation, Katniss is a
reluctant heroine. She won’t pander to
the Capitol’s media or its cameras in the ways that Haymitch, her perceptive
mentor, suggests might be necessary for her to actually win the games. If spectators empathize with or come to favor
a tribute, they send help into the arena, little metal parachutes with containers
full of much-needed medicine, food, or supplies.

Katniss is forced to think through the costs of
her refusal to perform as a more typical, coy, feminine girl, but her continued
unwillingness to capitulate makes her an important role model for what will no
doubt be legions of the film’s teenaged girl fans. Ross carefully establishes Katniss’s
foils—the girly-girl tributes from the other districts who interview with the
games’ television host, Caesar Flickerman (a terrifically campy Stanley Tucci,
in a blue wig and practically Elizabethan garb).

Although they prove themselves to be quite tough
in the arena, for their interviews most of the other girls wear sexy dresses
and assume flirtatious manners. And during the games, they combine forces with
the alpha males, playing the Bonnies to their Clydes. These female tributes are also
lethal—especially Clove (Isabelle Fuhrman), who throws knives—but they’re
represented in relation to their young men.

Katniss can’t even fathom such gender performances
or alliances. Her subsistence-level life
has taught her only to survive, and has stripped away the niceties of human interaction
to a central, necessarily suspicious core.
Gale is the only person she trusts, with whom she can briefly let down
her guard as they talk, before the reaping, in the woods.

But even there, Ross disallows any hint of romance.
Theirs is a relationship built on trust
and need and a long-standing regard and love.
Only when Katniss leaves for the games, and her relationship with Peeta
is broadcast around Panem, does Gale realize he’s jealous. His own embarrassment and confusion makes him
sweet and rather feminine himself.

Peeta, on the other hand, quickly understands that
playing to the crowd might curry important favor. He waves to the Capitol fans who watch their
bullet train enter the city, crafting a charismatic smile to wear for
them. (Hutcherson’s appealing, low-key
magnetism is perfect for the self-deprecating Peeta.)

He insists on taking
Katniss’s hand and raising it in a show of victory as their chariot rolls
through the gigantic presentation hall at their pre-games debut. As their clothing flames behind them, he
tells Katniss the fans will love their daring, and he’s right. Katniss suspiciously jerks her hand from his,
but he persuades her otherwise.

Katniss and Hutcherson (as Peeta) train for the games

When, during his own interview with Flickerman,
Peeta declares his love for Katniss, it’s not immediately clear if he’s playing
to the cameras again or if he means it. The
rest of the film hangs on this ambiguity.

But if Peeta is wily about winning through an
appeal to spectators, Katniss’s survival skills keep her firmly enmeshed in the
immediacy of the arena’s challenge. How
wonderful to watch this girl-hero read the woods, feeling the soil for moisture,
crushing leaves in her hand and releasing them to see how the wind blows, using
her bow and arrow to bag food and, in the end, to protect herself and Peeta
from the remaining tributes.

How lovely to see Peeta hang back behind her as
they move through the forest, Katniss with an arrow cocked in her bow for their
mutual protection. How amusing the hear
Peeta joke that he’ll take the bow to hunt, and to watch Katniss’s incredulous reaction. How nice to see the girl save the boy,
helping him into a sheltered cave when he’s hurt, risking everything to get
medicine for him, and masterminding the actions that in the end will save them
both.

Lawrence plays these actions with an understated
performance that’s alive with nuance.
Her face registers everything, but in subtly expressive ways—with the
twitch of an eye, a small compression of her lips, a hard-won smile, a flicker
of confusion. Her pre-games interview
with Caesar Flickerman is a marvel of acting as reaction. Katniss is startled and confused by the
audience’s uproarious response to her answers to his questions, but she doesn’t
have the vaguest idea how to play to their affections, as she’s been tutored.

Tucci as Flickerman and Katniss in her pre-games interview

Lawrence works for every smile Katniss
musters. Wearing her red,
off-the-shoulder gown, offering to model its fiery train for Flickerman,
wearing make-up that’s alien on her face and a hairstyle that’s foreign to her,
Katniss looks like a girl in the drag of femininity, trying to work it as
ridiculously as Sandra Bullock playing Miss Congeniality, but with much less
comedy and much higher stakes.

Katniss’s final confrontation with President Snow
(Donald Sutherland, oily and reptilian as ever) models a chilly resistance and
promises quite a David v. Goliath confrontation as the trilogy builds
momentum. Lawrence’s performance is clear
and strong; she does Katniss justice by acting with economy and reserve. Katniss’s inscrutability serves her well
among her enemies and the film’s spectators; it keeps her mysterious,
unpredictable, and interesting.

Much has been made of the story’s violence,
especially among young people forced to murder one another by heartless
manipulators. Although the film is tense
with the sounds and ever-present threat of bloodshed, remarkably little of it
is actually seen on screen.

The initial bloodbath at the cornucopia, when the
tributes are first delivered to the arena, is cut in rapid sequences in which,
once again, the briefly pictured parts—of faces, limbs, actions, objects—come to
stand for the whole without directly representing the killing.

Occasionally, one of the more vicious
tributes is seen murdering someone, but usually at a remove. Katniss and Peeta are rarely shown directly
inflicting violence; their humanity is always evident and operative.

Ross also keeps sentiment at bay, even in the more
emotional, moving scenes. Katniss takes young Rue (Amandla Stenberg), a tribute
from District Eleven, under her wing, after Rue helps her escape from the “career”
tributes who’ve surrounded the tree in whose branches Katniss keeps herself
safe. Their relationship mirrors that of
Katniss and Prim. Lawrence and Stenberg play
their scenes together beautifully, creating a warmth and connection that belies
their murderous environment.

Amandla Stenberg as Rue

That Katniss cares for Rue until her bitter end, and
uses the occasion of her tragic death to gesture in solidarity to her comrades
in District Eleven, begins the insurgency that grows through the rest of the trilogy. Here, too, Lawrence productively underplays Katniss’s
defiance, emphasizing her hesitant heroism.

In addition to its progressive and nuanced take on
gender, The Hunger Games also
presents a sophisticated view of an entirely multiracial future society. Those with the most state power continue to
be white—President Snow (pun intentional, I assume), Seneca Crane, Caesar
Flickerman, and the others are all white (and male).

But in the Capitol and in the districts, Ross
has careful cast the extras and other characters in a multiracial array. Every crowd shot is full of people of color
as well as people who look white, enough so that the racial and ethnic
diversity of appearance is notable.

When Katniss’s alliance with Rue provokes a revolt
against the Capitol in District Eleven, Ross films their riots in a style reminiscent
of footage of 1960s American civil rights demonstrations. The Peacekeepers subdue the protesters with water
cannons. People of various races,
working together, overturn dumpsters and destroy property.

The scene is shot in a palette of black and
white, and the protestors’ anger and determination, along with the Peacekeepers’
might and the general confusion of social rebellion, look very much like images
from the 60s.

In addition to its admirable representations of
gender and race, heterosexual romance is muted profitably in The Hunger Games. Katniss’s tenderness is reserved for Rue; their sweet, more emotionally expressive moments
are lovely and moving. Katniss’s rage
and grief when Rue dies is her most overt emotional moment during the games.

She also grows attached to Peeta, but because they’re
both aware that they’re playing to the cameras, the authenticity of their
romantic involvement is always in doubt.

Although by the film’s end, it’s clear that Gale
is jealous of Katniss’s relationship with Peeta, and that the sincere and
earnest Peeta very much wants to continue the romance they’ve performed,
reducing these relationships to “Team Gale” and “Team Peeta” to parallel the
Team Edward/Team Jacob triangle of the Twilight
franchise is just silly. The Hunger Games is about much more than
a young girl choosing between two very different suitors; it’s about fascism and
rebellion, about hope and social critique.

I find myself delighted by the amount of press this
film has already generated, most of it positive, for a screenplay co-written
(with Billy Ray) by a woman based on her novels, about a young woman whose
ethical humanity, physical strength, and emotional intelligence is a terrific
model for us all.

About Me

I'm a writer who loves going to the theatre and the movies, watching television, reading novels, and then thinking about what all of it means. I teach at Princeton University, in the English Department and in the Lewis Center for the Arts Theatre Program. I also direct Princeton's Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. I believe in quality writing about the arts and the importance of the arts to social life. I also believe the arts do and should give us pleasure and hope, as well as inspiring our creativity and a more expansive sense of what our lives together can be.